overview

transdisciplinary project by Adriana Sa and Isabelle Schad

transdisciplinary project by Adriana Sa and Isabelle Schad

THIS IS JUST TO DO has developed through an intermedia work process, in which the participant artists have mutually challenged themselves for exploring and crossing the conceptual and technical "borders" underlying their disciplinary formations (sound, movement, visual arts, video).

A collective work-in-progress can assume permanent mutation as a stimulus for exercising one’s artistic response capabilities. It might promote the exploration of artistic and personal tools in depth through the variability of the work’s context.

Individual and collective adaptability/creativity - the human relational dynamics - become part of the structure underlying a project, which vouches for its "freshness" through continuing improvisations.

The project is developing permanently through a broad collective creation process (itinerary of collective residences attached), which trace and orientation is set by the initiators of the project.

Part 1 (Barcarena, Hamburg, Dresden, Chemnitz, Berlin, NY) was generally dedicated to some practical "definition" of the collective work process, including artists of different nationalities and artistic backgrounds.
Part 2 (Neerpelt, Antwerps, Berlin, Chemnitz) gathered a group of artists who had participated in previous residences. It related to the creation of a piece that should be able to tour adapting itself to each specific performance environment.
Part 3 (Lisbon,) integrates both local adaptations of this piece and improvised events. These last ones might also include the participation of local artists who have been previously external to the project’s development.

The trace of several practical researches has been followed, such as: looking for balance(s) between improvising and structuring - integration of both in the performances; balancing the relationship between personal "domains" - inter-action of different sensibilities; extending, re-inventing and re-assimilating disciplinary and personal tools and experiences; exploring the meanings inherent to any specific working spaces - the site determines different senses - common sensibility towards the space; articulating the "absurd" within a game between tension, irony and seriousness; exploring, in a human and esthetical way, processes related to identity transfer, fusion and splitting.

Reviews

A Memorable ’This is just to do/Part 2’ in the Monty

Do you know that bunker feeling in the arts ? Artists who go underground to do radical things. The public who comes to watch gets the feeling that they are experiencing something special. Those who weren’t there can hear stories for years about ’the good old days in the cold, dark bunker’. That is the atmosphere of ’This is just to do/Part 2’, tonight in the Monty.
Do you also know that stuff about ’work in progress’, that ’the process is more important that the result’ and the artistic slander of result orientated thinking? Do you sometimes have the feeling that the blah-blah has to cover or justify the lack of quality and unfinishedness?
Well, that is not ’This is just to do/Part 2’. It is a work where the process was so important that the result stands head and shoulders above the usual.

’This is just to do/Part 2’ is a concept by the German Isabelle Schad (who has danced with Wim Vandekeybus and showed her own work in the Ultima Vez presentation evening) and Adriana Sá, who is specialized in sound installations, mixed-media projects and visual art in the largest sense of the word. But an interdisciplinary collective of twelve artists also worked on this creation. The work came to exist through five international residen*s in theater work places, from Hamburg to New York and Neerpelt, where there was always a showing, with different artists from the twelve. In between, the artists improvised and created separately. All these works in progress were ingredients from which the eight artists distilled ’This is just to do/Part 2’. The least you can say about such a process is that the participants are not easily distracted.

Luckily. They’ve made one of the few (real) multi-media performances where the whole doesn’t get suffocated under the parts. Even though the collective is quite broad, there is no overkill with the input, strengthening the different media instead of making each other superfluous. The arts which take part are : dance performance and visual art, with sound installations, video projections, light creation and visual installations.

What the performance is really about is hard to say. What is sure is that the artists are playing with fetishes, image-culture and life in the big city as a context. The two female dancers play with their icon-status through high heels, a Bugs Bunny mask, wigs, breasts and movements that make one think of manequins. Also, the male performer captures his own sexuality in a comparison with Bugs Bunny, via an installation with white boxes. These boxes also serve as temporary screens for video projections, such as a film of a carjacking (speeded up, repeated, forwards and backwards). Later, the performers imitate the movements from the film. This is not really revolutionary. The Woostergroup did it first. But this collective isn’t trying to open anyones eyes to some kind of human condition.

But at the same time they do say something about that condition. About our habit for stimulus, for example via the noise-soundscape, which works on you agressively, but which you get used to. Or the flickering of lights under the stage, through which you realize that you had forgotten them. There are also the live video recordings, visual work which makes the body a stackable building material. At the end, the stage empties, and a lonesome bunny remains behind, a lost rabbit in a stone desert. The ladies and gentlemen of the collective looked proud and relieved at the bow. With right.

Wim Vandekeybus, Kristien de Coster and the team of Ultima Vez, and the team of Monty, Isabelle Lhoas, Sofia Bustorff, Franziska Luethy, Heiko Schramm, Ana Portela, Gil Mendo, Maria d’Assis

NOTE 1

One can say my main interest refers to exploring the human being’s most inner dimensions: the psychics - human factor functioning as initial motivation; dealing with fragility, (not)normality of human mind, dealing with desire and fantasy in men/women. Individualization and isolation within (dis)harmony are attractive issues. Life approaches schizophrenia mysteriously, and it cannot be translated into words, it remains inexplicable although it is present in every day life’s absurdity.
NOTE 2

"...and as things fell apart nobody was paying much attention..."
Schizophrenia is recognized through one’s own personality splitting. The structure of thoughts created is dissolved; there is a quick, sudden change occurring, breaking down all mental unity, building up some defective uniformity of striving and willing, turning all of it "material", perceptible.
One is occupied mainly with oneself. One seems to suffer a lot for the pressure caused by one’s splitting mind and paradoxical feelings. An insurmountable obstacle confuses and occupies one’s whole world. Wondering around in darkness and confusion, one reaches the edge of consciousness: things, which cannot be mirrored in the common reality. They reach their own independence and transform themselves into a kind of lengthened nightmare.
In this sense, one turns unable to deal with one’s own "destiny", one merges into pressure, reaching and overcoming borderlines in consciousness. There is a borderline crossing, which brings changes of identity / personality. One enters the skin of "someone else". Transformation happens in fantasy and fantasy is taken as reality.
NOTE 3

In this project we challenge ourselves with the unexplainable, the very inside intuited as a kind of notion, which is supposed to become perceivable. The unknown / mystery is present in everything which remains untold, and still there is that unexpected which although is expected in the very inside.
Performing is not possible if you keep from your very inside, from what you personally bring along. Keeping close to yourself means here keeping small, anxious, narcissi. This might have a shocking effect, it can turn rather violent.
Violence can be fascinating, it can be seen in its own beauty, in its danger, it can turn a catharsis.
Within a really cruel, violent moment, when you feel like crying, everything seems extremely absurd and sometimes you hardly distinguish pain from need of laughing. We want to concentrate on this thin borderline, existing between laughing and crying, on what ever conducts people to that self-immersion reaching an extreme emotional state. What are those experiences? Banal every day life is often more absurd than anything else. One could fall into a kind of humor, a sarcastic irony, which place themselves not far from violence and fear.

Isabelle Schad (2000)

Furthermore

NOTE 1

After one or two centuries of increasing overload in urban life, one might recognize certain human physical / mental / emotional adaptations towards dealing with overlapping stimuli. We can perceive the poem of subtlety within noise. The natural harmony got out of random mix. The human behind the machine, the punctuation of the less expected.
Illusions as reality’s multiples exist in a fascinating place for creation. This place integrates a wide range of perceptions and insights.

NOTE 2

Assuming the artistic making as a performative procedure itself implies playing with the extent to which this more or less private process gets explicit; either if performing publicly either if working under more private circumstances.
Anyway it can be a personal exposure within a game between control over what happens and acceptance-integration of the "external" Í a deal with randomness.
Working in collaboration seems to emphasize the demand for openness and tuning, immediate-instinctive reaction regarding the circumstances. It happens within a single output dialogue. Beyond a neural awareness of the whole, this work process requires that fragile balance between one’s individuality and one’s production in conjunction; a balance worked out as unity without losing the creative tension, i.e., the specific differences.One gets occasionally provided with intensive living together fragments. It could reach a collapse through the excess of fragmentation, it is always happening although it is never inescapable. Recordings of collaborations are tools of undeniable reality. If one tries to avoid honesty one gets betrayed by the work.

NOTE 3

Receptivity, emotions, physic, impulses and intuitions (the body) are raw material. The performative affirmation of the self is also its representation. Every act and movement is stretched through this significance - it acquires the force of a ritual.
The work process balances non-linearity and randomness with intuitive control, it creates and simultaneously follows the moment. Stimuli and emotions populate the work’s environmental density. The body generates them while it simultaneously remains unprotected when they return in their "visibility": this feedback takes one to unexplainable liminalities. It is a permanent game between perception, challenge and reaction, a mirror game.

"This is just to do" has developed through an intermedia work process, in which the participant artists have mutually challenged themselves for exploring and crossing the conceptual and technical "borders" underlying their disciplinary formations.

This work-in-progress has assumed the form of several collective residencies in four countries (PORT, BE ,GER and USA), joining a nucleus of artists of different nationalities and disciplines (sound, movement, electronics, visual arts, video).

Beyond the group working now at Gulbenkian, the project has benefited from the contribution of other artists who participated in previous residences: Benton Bainbridge (USA), Cristina Moura (Brasil), Claudia Serpa Soares (Portugal), David Linton (USA), Jochen Roller (Alemanha), Melissa Lockwood (USA), and Nuno Bizarro (Portugal).

This is a project conceived by Adriana Sa and Isabelle Schad who tried to orientate consequently the progression of all collective residen*s, considering their own very different professional backgrounds; and, in fact, assuming the work as a group creation. The result is truly collective, since it is all about a collaboration system articulating personal approaches and individual artistic interests within a structural unity.

One has followed the way of practical researches, such as: balance between improvising and structuring; exchange, re-invention and re-assimilation of disciplinary and personal tools and experiences; exploration of the signifies inherent to the specific working spaces/sites; articulation of the "absurd" within a game between tension, irony and seriousness; esthetical exploration of processes related to identity transferring, fusion and splitting.
Production